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When the victorious Prussians entered Prague in 1866, they issued a proclamation to the Czechs recognising their right to independence. This proclamation was probably drafted by the Czech exile J.V. Fric, an ardent democrat who fled abroad after the abortive revolution of 1848.
The Czechs and other Slavs have greatly contributed to these defeats by their passive resistance. It was only the intervention of German troops which saved Austria from an utter collapse in 1915, and which prevented the Czechs from completing their aim of entirely disorganising the military power of Austria. Slav regiments have since then been intermixed with German and Magyar troops.
In peace time, not only were the suppressed nations, such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Luthenians, Poles, Slovenes, Italians, but all the citizens of Austria-Hungary, denied the right of free speech and freedom of the Press.
Hard fighting is going on in Siberia; victories and defeats have just been reported from the Caucasus; battles between Bolshevists and peace-lovers are raging in Esthonia; blood is flowing in streams in the Ukraine; Poles and Czechs have only now signed an agreement to sheath swords until the Conference announces its verdict; the Poles and the Germans, the Poles and the Ukrainians, the Poles and the Bolshevists, are still decimating each other's forces on territorial fragments of what was once Russia, Germany, or Austria."
We gave them the latest news of the war situation and much to their disgust they realized that had they waited only two weeks longer they could have gone by train, for the attack by the Czechs on the Magyars and the Bolsheviki, in the trans-Baikal region, had cleared the Siberian railway westward as far as Omsk. After half an hour's talk we drove off in opposite directions.
This situation in mind the Allied Supreme War Council urged a plan whereby an Allied expedition of respectable size would be sent to Archangel with many extra officers for staff and instruction work, to meet the Czechs and reorganize and re-equip them, rally about them a large Northern Russian Army, and proceed rapidly southward to reorganize the Eastern Front and thus draw off German troops from the hard pressed Western Front.
The management of the railways has been placed in the hands of Prussian military officials; the use of the Czech language has been suppressed in the administration, where it had formerly been lawful. The Czechs have been denied access to the Magistrature and to public offices where they had occasionally succeeded in directing the affairs in their own country.
As the Hungarians always stood together in any struggle with Austria, they were likely to get the better of the bargain. There was the additional difficulty that no agreement of any sort could be adopted in the Austrian parliament, which had become hopelessly disorganized through the savage conflicts between the various groups, Germans, Czechs, anti-Semites, etc.
And Poland herself became the prey of Prussia, Russia and Austria some 170 years later, notwithstanding the constitution of May 3 and the heroic resistance of Kosciuszko. The regeneration of the Czechs at the end of the eighteenth century meant the resumption of friendly relations between Czechs and Poles.
But the liberation of the Czechs would not be complete unless their close kinsmen the Slovaks were included in the new Bohemian State; and every reason alike of politics, race, and geography tells overwhelmingly in favour of such an arrangement. The Slovaks, who would to the last man welcome the change, have long suffered from the gross tyranny of Magyar rule.
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